Instructions
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Entering A Conversation About Race, Gender, and Listening:
We talk too often about race and racism as if they are solely visual concepts. As Jennifer Lynn Stoever tells us, “Americans have long understood race as expressed through attitudes about skin color and visible phenological differences—such as hair texture and lip contour—and the power differentials resulting from an ideological, racialized visual gaze” (3-4). In Stoever’s excerpt, “The Sonic Color Line and the Listening Ear” (Course Readings > Project 3 Readings), she unsettles the assumed relationship between race and looking. Her goal is to “facilitate public conversation about the relationship between sound, race, and American life” (7). Stoever introduces two new concepts, the sonic color line and the listening ear, to explore the often undetected ways in which sound and listening have also functioned to produce and enforce racial hierarchies throughout history and in our present moment.
And in Oluo’s chapter, “What is intersectionality and why do we need it?” she helps us better understand that “our experience of race is shaped by far more than just our skin color and hair texture….Each of us has a myriad of identities—our gender, class, race, sexuality, and so much more—that inform our experiences in life and our interactions with the world” (75). While Oluo is not necessarily talking about our listening practices, she is talking about how our privileges and oppressions “can combine with each other, compound each other, mitigate each other, and contradict each other” (75). Oluo’s formulation can help us to enter a conversation that considers how race and gender affect how we listen and make sense of particular soundscapes. A good example of how, say, race can shape listening comes in the opening paragraph of Gustavus Stadler’s “On Whiteness and Sound Studies” when he argues that a “listener’s racial identity” will impact how they hear a police siren in an urban neighborhood.
And finally, in Christine Ehrick’s “Vocal Gender and the Gendered Soundscape,” she invites readers “to contemplate the way gender – and gendered hierarchies – may be projected and/or heard in sound environments.” Her concept, gendered soundscapes, brings together a concern for sound, gender, and history. And much like Stoever, who claims that much of our talk about race and racism are largely seen through the visual, Ehrick tells us that “Although many of us have been well-trained to look for gender, I consider what it means to listen for it.” So, in the spirit of Stoever, Oluo, and Ehrick, I invite you to tune into the ways that race and gender inform our listening practices and soundscapes.

The Assignment:
For our final argument-driven and inquiry-based project, please develop some idea you have about how listening can be racially coded and gendered. In other words, how might race and gender shape how we (and others) listen? This project asks you to work with multiple conceptual frameworks such as Stoever’s sonic color line and listening ear, Oluo’s intersectionality, and Ehrick’s gendered soundscape, as analytical tools to examine some site that you select for a case study. Your site, which should offer a demonstration/example of how YOU think listening can be racially coded and gendered, should be some kind of cultural artifact such as a scene from a TV show or movie, a song, a news clip/article, a YouTube video, a social media post, personal account, field recording, etc.

The goal, here, is to make some creative connections between the analytical tools circulating in our course materials and a site that provides a case study/demonstration/example for the argument that you set up and develop. In other words, you are using concepts from our course materials as a “frame” to read your site.
The anchoring move of this project is your articulation of what you see as the implication of this connection. You should actively and critically be thinking about what readers can learn from your careful exploration of this connection.

☞The written portion of this draft should be 1,000 words (double-spaced) by Tuesday, April 28, 1:30PM and you should, at a minimum:

Draw deeply from two of our course texts. Introduce and situate the texts, paraphrase their arguments or key parts, work with quotation and key words or concepts, etc. And

Render your site with specific details and close contact (description, documentation, quotation, interview, recording, etc.). This project should be making use of multimodal composition, and as such, you should be thinking about making meaning with “more than words”.
Set up your argument by using framing language to represent and shape what your project will be exploring.
Evaluation Criteria:
Forthcoming on a separate handout.

Reading assignment